I’ve owned my own domain name (www.billderusha.com) for a few months now but I haven’t done anything with it.  Mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  I know from experience that Google values domain name keywords very highly.

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Sorry for not keeping the posts coming as regularly as I’m sure we would all like.  The reason for this is two-fold:

1. I haven’t gotten into the habit of scheduled writing time (which is necessary).  The blog is less than a month old and I am just as new.

2. More importantly I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the blog and the direction I want to take it in.

The tone is wrong.  It isn’t me.  And for a blog that has a focus on personal branding to not have its own authentic and unique voice is wrong on so many levels.  I haven’t been posting because I need to find my voice.  I can’t just type out posts knowing that every sentence is taking me one step further down a road I don’t want to be taking.

Right now I feel as if I’m speaking with the voice and tone of an expert in the fields of both personal branding and SEO.  While I am somewhat knowledgable in both of those topics I am certainly not an expert.  I haven’t done this for 20 years and am just now deciding to impart my wisdom unto the masses.  No. I’m perpetually a humble student of both personal branding and SEO.  I am constantly learning and growing stronger in both.  My personal brand needs work, my SEO skills are still being honed and developed, and my personal brand in search is not 100% where I want it to be.

That being said, I am officially changing the approach of this blog to something that feels right.  This blog will still be 100% about growing and optimizing your personal brand in search.  The only difference will be in the approach.  I’m not an expert (yet).  I don’t know what definitely works and what definitely doesn’t. I’m going to document everything I do online and show how it affects my personal brand in search.  Based on the results you may choose to do the same.  This should be a conversation.  If you try something out that works (or perhaps fails miserably) post it in the comments.  Hopefully by the time this is all over (read: when everyone in the world is #1 for their own personal brand) this blog will be a resource of trials, tribulations, and recommendations for how to control your brand.  Maybe then I’ll be expert enough to brand myself as such.  For now I hope you find my experiences helpful in controlling your own brand.

Optimizing your personal brand can be daunting. You look at your search results and you see maybe a few sites that are you. Maybe you don’t see anything at all. But you want to just click that refresh button and see it all change.  Sadly, that’s not how things work. It’s important to look at this as a marathon rather than a sprint.  If you work slowly and methodically you will start to take hold in a big way.

You can only optimize one online asset at a time.  Let me repeat that.

You can only optimize one online asset at a time.

You simply can’t do it all in one fell swoop. It’s all about priorities.  Make your most relevant assets found first.  So here’s a to-do list for you:

1. Make a list of all the places you can be found online. Include high-quality things like relevant and recent profiles, personal websites, and content you’ve created like videos, articles, blog posts, etc. Also list low-quality references like if you were quoted in your school paper, or listed by name in a photograph, or old high school track meet results,and of course any negative press should you be unlucky enough to have any.
2. Prioritize your list in terms of how you want to brand yourself. As a business professional I would recommend starting with either your own personal website (if you have one) or your LinkedIn profile (which, if you don’t have one yet you need it).  If you’re a musician you might want your myspace or last.fm profiles to be front and center.  Either way, go through them all and figure out what order you would put your results in if you got to magically create your own search results page.
3. Get to work.

Take that first item on your list and make it your number one priority.  As it grows you will see a snowball effect.  You can start to use the power of your first optimized site to build up your other sites.